Time in A Rose for Emily - Essay Example

 Time in “A Rose for Emily” Time plays a very palpable role in William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily.” Almost strong enough to be considered a character of its own, Time marches through the story in a disjointed fashion, always leaving its mark wherever it touches. Through Faulkner’s approach, not only do readers get a glimpse of the old South of the 1800s, but they are given an idea of the story’s early 1900s present through the voice of the narrator(s). However, even in dealing with aspects of the past, Faulkner shows that time can and will affect changes however much they might be shunned or ignored by those trapped within its domain. Throughout “A Rose for Emily,” readers experience the rigidity of the past, the flexible nature of the present and the battle constantly fought between them. By utilizing several of the older characters in the story as symbols, Faulkner demonstrates the unchanging and unchangeable nature of the past through the actions of these characters. Standing out as the prime example for his case is Miss Emily Grierson herself, as inflexible and unchanging as possible. Miss Emily’s inflexibility is demonstrated in several instances, most notably when she insists the Aldermen speak with Colonel Sartoris regarding the question of her taxes when “Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years” (435) and when she refused to acknowledge her father’s change of state upon his death. “Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body” (437). In dealing with other people, Miss Emily proves just as implacable. “Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up” (439). Throughout the story, Miss Emily is further characterized as an unchanging object through the use of such imagery as “her upright torso motionless as that of an idol” (437) as she is framed in a lit window, “We had long thought of them as a tableau; Miss Emily a slender silhouette in the background” (437) when discussing the image the town had of Emily and her father, and the occasional glimpse of her “in one of the downstairs windows … like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which” (442). According to Mary Ellen Byrne (2003), “this reconstructed ever-present scene stands motionless, a frozen moment image of stasis, the tableau vivant.” A tableau vivant is a still scene in which people are present but they don’t move, like an old image in which everyone stands stiff and immobile. It is “a freezing of time and motion in order that a certain quality of the human experience may be held and contemplated” (Zink, 1956: 291). Even the one time period in which towns people saw Miss Emily to be most alive, just following her father’s death and while she was courting Homer Barron, she remains described in terms of rigid, unchanging material — “her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows — sort of tragic and serene” (438). Making the picture of Miss Emily the object complete, the inanimate objects associated with Miss Emily were also seen to be unchanging with the passing of years. The house is a “big, squarish frame house that had once been white” that lifts “its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps — an eyesore among eyesores” (433). Correspondence sent addressed from Miss Emily are described as “a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink” (434) indicating neither the paper nor the ink had changed. In their faded quality, neither had retained the ability to communicate under the terms of the present. Even in her activities, Miss Emily proves to be outdated, utilizing her one skill, the ability to paint china, to earn some extra money for a few years. “She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris’ contemporaries were sent to her … Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her” (441). Miss Emily is not the only character to symbolize the unchanging nature of the past, though. In Tobe, Miss Emily’s servant, the reader finds a character with no voice and no change in pattern. “Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket” (442) indicates that the only change observed in this character was the inevitable aging. Although the newer generation is insistent about addressing the issue of the odor coming from Miss Emily’s home, the older generation is more concerned about propriety when addressing a woman of gentle birth. “’Dammit sir,’ Judge Stevens said, ‘will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?’” (436). That the older generation held sway in this decision is shown by the composition of the Board of Aldermen “three greybeards and one younger man” and in the action taken “four men crossed Miss Emily’s lawn and slunk about the house like burglers, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings … They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings” (436). While there are plenty of symbols to represent the past contained in the story, the largest voice for the present is contained in the plural form of Faulkner’s narrator. From the very beginning of the story, we are told “our whole town went to her funeral” and the house was located on “what had once been our most select street, immediately inviting the reader in as part of the group and setting the tone of a gossipy Southern town welcoming in new neighbors. Later, “when we saw her again” and as the reader becomes aware that “we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest” (438), the tone has changed somewhat, but still indicates a presently living, presently very active, group of people telling the story rather than a single town relic. That the present voice is constantly in flux can be seen in the various second-guessing happening throughout the narrative as in “at first we were glad” (438) and “the next day we all said, ‘She will kill herself’; and we said it would be the best thing” (440) as the narrative switches from being in favor of Miss Emily’s happiness to being in favor of Miss Emily’s demise in keeping with the news of the day. A different mind-set is also seen in the way in which the town interacts with Miss Emily. While the old guard was satisfied with not charging taxes and inventing a story to explain the reason, the “next generation, with its more modern ideas” had “some little dissatisfaction” with the arrangement (434). The narrator, along with the new Board of Aldermen, Homer Barron and the newer generation see things as “present, a mechanical progression” as compared to Miss Emily’s “world of tradition, divided from us by the most recent decade of years” (West, 1973). Although quite flat and undeveloped, the character of Homer Barron also helps to symbolize the present point in time as it is juxtaposed against the unchanging past. To begin with, Homer Barron is a Yankee, a character that is immediately recognized by those in the south as bringing about change and new ideas. He is described as a “big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face” (438). His tendency to always be where laughter was heard, to be in the “center of the group” and to have it “known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club” further indicate Homer Barron is intended to represent the present (440). It is through her association with Homer Barron that Miss Emily comes closest to entering the present world as she is seen with him “on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable,” (438). She appears more in public as “we learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler’s and ordered a man’s toilet set in silver. … Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men’s clothing, including a nightshirt and we said, ‘They are married’” (440). However, Homer Barron is also “not a marrying man” (440) and his inability to remain unchanged proved to be his downfall. This battle between the past and the present can be seen throughout the story, but no where more evident than in the relationship between Homer Barron and Miss Emily. The arrival of Miss Emily’s cousins in town precipitates a withdrawal from Homer Barron in response. “So we were not surprised when Homer Barron … was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily’s coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins” (440-41). That Homer remained as changeable as the present is evident in that he returned “within three days” as a “neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening” (441). However, Miss Emily was not accustomed to change and could not overcome the training of her unchanging past. As the narrators tell it, “that was the last we saw of Homer Barron” (441). As the story unfolds, the reader learns that Miss Emily brought Homer Barron into her world in the only way she knew how. When the men of the town broke through the door of the upstairs bedroom following Miss Emily’s death, they describe a grisly scene. “The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, … what was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust” (443). Further allusions to the advance of time affecting even those determined to remain in the past are liberally sprinkled through the story as well. The Negro man becomes “grayer and more stooped” (442), Miss Emily herself “had grown fat and her hair was turning gray” (441) and the house was “filled with dust and shadows” (442). Although Miss Emily had managed to stop Homer Barron’s present-minded progress, time was still able to reach him, turning his corpse into something that had become “inextricable from the bed in which he lay” with a “profound and fleshless grin” (443). Although Faulkner painted the past as unchangeable and the present as unstoppable, the conflict presented between the two provided victories to either side. With Miss Emily’s triumph over Homer Barron, the reader is shown the victory of the past to overpower the present, bringing it to a halting standstill. However, the repeated allusions to decay of both the house and the individuals representing the past indicate that time cannot be stopped, it will continue to move forward bringing changes whether desired or not. As it marches through the story, taking on the roles of the Old South against the new, the old traditions and the old characters as compared to the concepts of change and younger generations and as it becomes mixed up in the chronological telling of the story, Time can be seen to be just as important a character in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” as Emily herself. Works Cited Byrne, Mary Ellen. “Town and Time: Teaching Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily.’” Teaching Faulkner. New Jersey: Ocean Country College, 2003. October 22, 2007 Faulker, William. “A Rose for Emily.” Anthology of American Literature – 8th Edition. Ed. McMichael, George, James S. Leonard, Bill Lyne, Anne-Marie Mallon and Verner D. Mitchell. Boston: Prentice Hall, 2004. 433-444. West, Ray B. Jr. “A Rose for Emily: Critical Essay.” William Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism. Linda Welshimer Wagner (Ed.). Michigan: Michigan State University, 1973. 192-198. Zink, Karl E. “Flux and the Frozen Moment: The Imagery of Stasis in Faulkner’s Prose.” PMLA. Vol. 71, (1956): 285-301. Read More